ON THE HAMBURGER TRAIL : A simple burger? In the world of fast food, there’s no such thing--especially in the wake of last year’s food poisonings.

Thursday, June 30, North San Diego, Calif.: Jack in the Box decides to promote quarter-pound hamburgers in Seattle and Los Angeles during the week of July 25.

Tuesday, July 5, North San Diego, Calif.: The purchasing department calculates that the promotion will double quarter-pounder sales and places an order with SSI Foods Inc., for more than 40,000 pounds of patties.

Friday, July 15, Widmer, Idaho.: Using frozen beef from Australia, fresh beef from Idaho ad Western Montana as well as some fresh beef fat from Washington, SSI begins forming 920 cases of quarter-pound hamburgers.

Tuesday, July 19, Carson, Calif.: Silliker Laboratories receives a sample of frozen hamburgers from SSI’s Friday production. The lab begins to test for E. coli 0157:H7. At the same time Foodmaker begins its own testing process.

Wednesday, July 20, Carson, Calif.: All samples of SSI hamburger production from the previous Friday are declared clean.

Friday, July 22, City of Commerce, Calif.: Cases of SSI’s frozen hamburgers arrive at Foodmaker’s distribution center aboard specially equipped freezer trucks.

Monday, July 25, City of Commerce, Calif.: Frozen quarter-pound hamburgers are delivered to Jack in the Box restaurants including the North Hollywood location on Laurel Canyon Boulevard.

Friday, July 29, North Hollywood, Calif.: The new shipment of quarter-pound Jumbo Jacks are cooked to serve a busy lunch crowd.

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Americans--in a comfortable, familial way--take hamburgers for granted.

The relationship is not really extended to any other food. Sure, pizza and hot dogs are popular. But burger joints are part of the landscape--much like the post office or corner gas station, except much more popular.

Not even a surge of outbreaks linked to E. coli 0157:H7 bacteria in the last 21 months--resulting in more than 700 serious illnesses and four deaths--could slow sales.

But just what is hamburger? Where does the meat come from? And what is being done to prevent a repeat of the E. coli 0157:H7 incident?

The simple, plain fast-food hamburger is actually the result of a highly complex series of processes stretching halfway around the world, involving thousands of people, incorporating high science as well as manual labor and including meat from hundreds of different animals.

In the wake of last year’s food poisonings, Foodmaker’s Jack in the Box chain has taken the lead in incorporating the latest safety technology into food service. Other chains, such as Taco Bell and McDonalds, are close to implementing similar system-wide food safety programs but Foodmaker is the acknowledged leader.

“Not only are Foodmaker executives committed to ensuring that this never happens again at Jack in the Box but they are also instrumental in working to find a complete treatment and cure for E. coli 0157:H7 illnesses,” said Bob Galler, whose 3-year-old died from the infection and who now heads an E. coli victims’ support group named after his daughter, the Lois Joy Galler Foundation. Foodmaker donated $100,000 to the Galler Foundation last January.

To trace the story of one burger, The Times was given unlimited access to follow how the Jack in the Box chain orders, processes, stores, transports, laboratory-tests, cooks and serves its hamburgers. Foodmaker Inc., the parent company, made private business documents available; no questions were considered out-of-bounds. Suppliers and contractors also cooperated, with one exception: The Times could not gain access to one slaughter facility, although other, similar facilities were toured.

Here is the story of that “simple” hamburger.

Tuesday, July 5, 1994. North San Diego.

Foodmaker’s North San Diego headquarters has high, almost windowless adobe walls and a forbidding aspect; it seems more fortress than the support center for 1,175 Jack in the Box family restaurants.

It’s also busy. The summer months generate some of the year’s heaviest customer traffic throughout the chain. Preparations are now being made for a special promotion in one of the company’s six Western regions.

The previous Thursday--June 30--the marketing group decided to promote quarter-pound burgers for the week of July 25 in a region including Los Angeles and Seattle. Today, marketing sends an advertising directive to the purchasing director, who puts the necessary food orders through to the inventory management group. The two staffs are working several weeks in advance and are now focusing on food deliveries for the end of July.

Jack in the Box has the most ambitious menu of the fast-food chains with items based on five different cuisines: Japanese, Greek, Mexican, Chinese and regional American. But the bestseller has always been hamburgers. Only two sizes--a regular 1.6-ounce and a four-ounce Jumbo Jack patty--are served.

The company estimates that stores carrying the Jumbo Jack promotion will double their sales of the patty that week. In a regular week, the total sales from the 65 stores in the targeted region would amount to more than 10 tons of quarter-pound patties. This promotion should bump the figure to an entire tractor-trailer load of 160,000 quarter-pound burgers.

The order is punched into a computer terminal linked by modem to the company’s distribution centers. A copy is sent via computer network to SSI Food Services Inc. in Widmer, Idaho. SSI is one of only two Jack in the Box patty suppliers and, while unaware until now of the July 25 promotion, its supplies are in the pipeline.

The next morning, July 6, SSI places its orders to slaughterhouses for enough beef to fill the order.

Friday, July 15. Widmer, Idaho.

SSI Foods Inc.’s beef processing facility operates in a world of cold.

Even in the blistering summer heat, the plant’s temperatures are kept at 40 degrees or below in work areas and sub-zero in freezers. You never know what season it is outside the building because inside it is always uniformly, bone-chilling cold.

To stay warm and optimize sanitation, employees are dressed in bulky white coveralls, nets for head and even facial hair, hard hats and thick gloves. Some wear protective goggles.

Once every 24 hours, the entire plant is completely disassembled and cleaned with soap and hot water, then sanitized with a chlorine-based solution. On-site USDA inspectors then check for any sanitary deficiencies before the plant can restart production.

“Look: This is a clean plant,” SSI President Kirk Smith insists, pointing to stainless-steel equipment that shimmers in the artificial fluorescent light. “We make the best product possible. In this business, if garbage comes in the door then garbage goes out the door. There is no garbage here.”

In slaughterhouses in Australia, Idaho and Washington state, beef carcasses have been butchered in the traditional manner: the leanest meat placed in one container; prime cuts sent in another direction, and pure fat placed into other, specific boxes.

At SSI, lean beef and pure fat--which could be from different ranches, states, regions or even countries--are ground together to a customer’s specifications and then formed into that familiar round patty.

The quarter-pound patties being blended by SSI today include meat that is 50% lean from the Monfort Co., just down the road in Nampa, Idaho, and meat that is 90% lean shipped in from New South Wales, Australia. If necessary, and it usually is, fresh beef fat from Iowa Beef Processors in Pasco, Wash., is used to obtain the target of 26% fat in the quarter-pound patty.

The actual mixture of this Jack in the Box order will be about 40% American beef and 60% Australian beef.

Most of the American beef came from Monfort, a division of food giant Con Agra, which culls from ranches within a 200-square-mile area including the southwest corner of Idaho, Eastern Oregon, Washington and western Montana. The plant handles between 700 and 1,000 head per day. For this Jack in the Box order, the beef is from cattle on ranches in Idaho and western Montana.

After the animals were stunned, bled, skinned, gutted and chilled, Monfort sent the beef carcasses through its processing line for butchering. Meat was separated manually by an army of butchers and meat cutters. Then Monfort trucked the beef in 2,000-pound combo bins up Interstate 84 to SSI to be blended into hamburger patties.

The Australian beef comes from a large shipment of frozen beef SSI received by ocean freighter on June 24 in Oakland. The 2,000-pound bins were then transported to Widmer, about an hour north of Boise.

Dave Theno, Foodmaker’s vice president for quality assurance and product safety, says the Australians make an excellent product that is less expensive, even with shipping costs, than similar-quality American meat.

The Australian beef is a product of Lackley Ltd., a New South Wales-based company. The Aussie cattle were slaughtered in Macksville on May 30, or more than a month before Jack in the Box corporate officials decided to promote quarter-pound hamburgers. (SSI has a standing order for about one million pounds of Australia beef per week for Jack in the Box and other clients.)

Regardless of how cold and clean SSI’s plant is, you can’t tell whether harmful organisms are present. Ironically, neither can USDA employees in the current federal meat inspection program, who rely on sight, scent and touch to identify these invisible threats. In fact, detection of the organisms in question requires extensive microbiological testing.

Thus, SSI operates its own state-of-art laboratory. Neither the in-house lab nor independent outside laboratories have ever found E. coli 0157:H7 in SSI beef. Monfort has even tested cattle manure looking for E. coli traces but none have been found, says Smith.

Still, three samples are taken from each tractor-trailer load of meat or fat that is delivered to SSI for further analysis.

Since the 1993 E. coli contamination, Jack in the Box has changed hamburger sources. Foodmaker’s new policy is strict: If a processor’s ground meat tests positive for the bacteria more than once, that firm is dropped from the supply system. Any product that contains the harmful bacteria, and there have been several, is destroyed, Theno says.

Tuesday, July 19, 1994. Carson, Calif.

The human body provides the ideal breeding ground for E. coli 0157:H7--the organism thrives at about 98 degrees, or average body temperature. Once ingested, there is nothing to stop its growth and treatment is limited.

“There is a lot of E. coli’s ecology that isn’t understood,” says Foodmaker’s Theno. “It is a single cell, simple organism that needs more research. What we do know is that 90% of the E. coli cells that may be present in meat, for instance, will tolerate freezing temperatures well and just become dormant (until thawed).”

It is no longer enough for Jack in the Box that Monfort has lab-tested cattle manure, or that one of its slaughterhouses conducts microbiological surveys on each day’s production, or that SSI tests both incoming and outgoing meat.

Now, every shipment of hamburgers destined for Jack in the Box restaurants is placed on hold while Silliker Laboratories of California Inc., located in Carson, tests a representative sample for E. coli 0157:H7.

The procedure can take between one and six days, depending on whether any of the contaminant is present. Nothing leaves SSI or the other processors until the samples have been declared clean by Silliker.

The testing procedure is done in two steps. The first, which can be completed within 26 to 28 hours, can tell only whether the general family of E. coli organisms--which are common in the intestines of both humans and animals--are present. If any organisms are detected, an additional five days of complicated microbiological testing determines whether the bacteria are the harmful variety.

Silliker tests ground beef for a number of clients in addition to Jack in the Box. The lab says it’s getting positives on the first test once or twice a month and finding the potentially fatal E. coli 0157:H7 once every four months.

By Tuesday afternoon, July 19, Silliker informs Foodmaker that SSI’s Friday production of quarter-pound patties is clean.

Wednesday, July 20, 1994. North San Diego.

At the same time Silliker is running the E. coli tests, Foodmaker’s own Quality Assurance Laboratory is also testing the hamburgers from the previous Friday’s production at SSI. Technicians will determine whether the patties meet the chain’s physical, chemical and microbiological specifications.

“The best line of defense is to make sure the thing is cooked properly,” says Theno. “A problem or glitch could arise because of the wrong weight, shape or size. You can learn that just by cooking.”

At the moment, two lab technicians are cooking three regular-size hamburger patties according to Jack in the Box procedures. Cooking temperatures and times are monitored by computer. Once cooked, the burgers are taken off the grill and checked for thorough cooking. The patties are torn apart to make sure that no pink, uncooked beef remains, a color change that occurs at about 155 degrees.

Having experienced the trauma of a food poisoning outbreak that may have been caused by improper cooking, Foodmaker has become extremely attentive to the issue. The company and an independent manufacturer jointly developed a specially designed thermo-probe that is sensitive enough to get an instantaneous heat reading in the different parts of the thin hamburger meat.

After quickly analyzing the three samples both visually and with the thermo-probe, the lab tech announces, “everything is cooked.”

Friday, July 22, 1994. City of Commerce.

In addition to following long-standing safety practices, every refrigerated tractor-trailer that unloads at Foodmaker’s giant warehouse in Commerce carries a vital piece of equipment. Drivers check to see that the seal on the trailer’s door is intact and that the refrigeration equipment is working. They also check the load’s temperature. Most importantly, the driver and the warehouse supervisor inspect the Stires Temperature Recorder, the equivalent of the black box on a commercial airplane.

The Stires keeps a constant record of the internal temperature of the trailer for as many as eight days. Soon after going to work for Jack in the Box, Theno required that all trucks carry it.

“One year ago we would do a visual inspection of the truck and a temperature check upon arrival but we wouldn’t know what happened inside the trailer in Arizona or New Mexico. Now we do,” says Les Gardner, distribution center manager.

Foodmaker requires that trucks maintain a temperature of less than 10 degrees but prefers the level to remain around zero. A few readings blip upward toward 10 degrees on the Stires printout for this meat delivery, but all else looks good and the truck can be unloaded.

Another set of checks begins when Foodmaker delivers patties to the restaurants in its own fleet of trucks. Again, the Foodmaker trailers are equipped with Stires temperature recorders or an on-board computer that records the trailer’s temperature.

Beginning Monday, July 25, the warehouse will deliver the SSI hamburgers. From the Commerce warehouse, 440 Jack in the Box restaurants are supplied throughout Southern California, Las Vegas and the Colorado River resort area.

Foodmaker drivers have only 20 minutes to unload their trucks into the individual store’s freezers.

Friday, July 29, 1994. Laurel Canyon Boulevard, North Hollywood.

Lunch is always the busiest time for fast-food restaurants. Today at the Jack in the Box in North Hollywood is no exception.

There’s a fast-moving line of cars at the drive-up window. Inside, workers on lunch break crowd the counter to order. Families of four sit at tables, their plastic trays brimming with paper-wrapped hamburgers, large drinks and French fries. The place hums with conversation and laughter. Even an LAPD squad car swoops in for a quick stop at the drive-up window.

Twenty-one months ago, this particular restaurant could have been giving away food and not found any takers, but time has dimmed memories of the E. coli 0157:H7 episode.

The number of guests eating here is not the only difference. The kitchen has been compartmentalized to separate raw foods from cooked, ready-to-eat items. No one ever touches an uncooked hamburger at Jack in the Box. All are carefully handled with utensils.

Jack in the Box cooks its hamburgers from frozen patties to eliminate guesswork about thawing times, because they are easier to handle and because there are no meat juices present that can spread contamination. The cook places a quarter-pounder on the 375-degree grill and hits a timer. After a few minutes, an overhead digital monitor sounds a sharp alarm, directing the cook to flip the burger. It sounds again when the burger has finished cooking.

The final cooking phase is called the quality flip: The cook turns the patty a second time, notches the center with a spatula and makes sure the meat is cooked to a brown color throughout. If there is any pink, the burger remains on the grill until done. The chain will not serve burgers cooked rare or medium-rare.

The backbone of the Jack in the Box system is a food safety program developed by industry food scientists and called Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point or HACCP. The program here is represented by series of checklists and reports completed by employees as often as once each six-hour shift. Most extensive is the HACCP shift checklist, which identifies 33 critical points throughout the restaurant that need to be inspected by the manager.

In addition to the shift checklist, temperatures of all cooking surfaces must be taken twice daily. Another weekly checklist is also required of each restaurant, with 54 areas that need review. The weekly list is comparable to those used by local health inspectors.

Finally, a team of company auditors visits the restaurants about once a month with its own checklist to make sure each Jack in the Box is operating at optimum sanitation and is accurately completing the HACCP checklists.

“I’ve spent a lot of time in the field traveling to many of our restaurants, and I can now say that we have a darned good food safety system,” says Foodmaker’s Theno. “We also believe that we can give something back to our industry, and we will share the results of our program at scientific gatherings and other industry meetings.

“HACCP (had never been) designed for quick-serve restaurants. It was more suited to slaughterhouses and meat processing plants. There has never been this kind of safety system for restaurants, and I can now say that it is do-able. When we show this to the rest of the industry, it will turn on a light for a lot of people.”

And what about the hamburger that began its journey several weeks before and thousands of miles away? It was simple and good. More importantly, there was every reason to believe it was safe.

* The Man Who Saved Jack in the Box H8